Check out our Wish List!

The insect educational program I run has a wish list for supplies we use regularly to care for our animals:
Bug Barn Amazon Wish List
Please consider buying the Bug Barn some cages or crayons! That lets me use the savings to hire more undergraduates for hands on training.

This is an Archive!

This website is no longer open to comments or maintained; I've moved to a new home at Nature Geek

To save money I no longer block ads on this site or have a custom design.

Entomology. Ranting. Nerdery.

Americans: still not reading books

I really wanted my first post after Turkeyday to be happier, but this is so important, I wanted to mention it.

I’m a compulsive reader.
I’ll read an instruction manual if I’m stuck somewhere without a book.
I’m not allowed in bookstores unsupervised.
I am, in short, an addict. So seeing this study is very depressing:

“Today, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announces the release of To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, a new and comprehensive analysis of reading patterns in the United States…. teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

Less than 1/3rd of 13 year-olds read daily. And, this I found very interesting:

“Literary readers are more likely than non-readers to engage in positive civic and individual activities – such as volunteering, attending sports or cultural events, and exercising.”

So, is the breakdown in civility in society due to….less reading? Maybe!
Also, and this was pretty shocking, the quality of reading ability is declining even in groups that you would expect more from:

“Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.”